


not a glamorous affair

by sapphee



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Character Study, Family, Hair, Language Brokering, haircut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 17:10:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10540872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphee/pseuds/sapphee
Summary: Larissa's mom cuts hair for the whole family. Larissa reflects.





	

**Author's Note:**

> uploading some drabbles from my sideblog (omgcphee). please reblog [here](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/155696328119/lardo-hc-haircut)! 
> 
> note: i'm first-gen [to be born in the US//second-gen to live in the US] chinese american, while lardo is first-gen vietnamese american. i wrote this reflecting on the fact that my mom cuts my hair, and she doesn't really talk about her experiences except for while she's cutting my hair? something about how we can't make eye contact during it, probably. anyway, so yeah - i wrote about this in relation to lardo because i hc her mom as cutting hair for the family, too. but because i'm chinese american, not vietnamese american (asians/asian americans aren't a monolith; our experiences are not identical), lmk if something is off to you, and i'll fix it!

Larissa’s mom cuts hair for everyone in her family. She doesn’t do anything fancy, really—the most complicated thing she does is layer Larissa’s hair to lighten the weight of it. And it’s not a glamorous affair; the TV’s blaring, her grandmother is curled up on the couch knitting or mending Larissa's dad’s shirt, her dad is sitting on a stool in front of the TV, soaking his feet in a green plastic tub of warm water, intently watching the game, and her mom is quiet in a way she usually isn’t when she’s managing household things, half-watching the game, too. 

Larissa’s back is straight. She hears the whisper of the plasticky cover thing that her mom draped over her to keep the hair from getting on her clothes more than she feels the way it moves with her mom’s gentle but firm hands reminding her to keep her posture straight, the way her mom’s calloused hands guide her chin to a different angle. The _snip snip snip_  of the scissors drops strands of her cut hair on the back of her neck, too soft and damp to tickle, before the next _snip snip snip_  brings down more strands of hair that push the earlier-arrived strands to the ground and take their place. Her mom’s hand on her shoulder squeezes lightly, a warning for Larissa to stay still when her mom brings the shaver to her neck to buzz off the strands too short for scissors.

It’s a race against time for Larissa whenever her mom cuts her hair—as soon as she sits on the chair, her mind whirs with questions to ask and searches for the courage to speak, because there’s rarely another time that her mom talks about how she never got to visit the grave of her 15-year-old uncle that she never met but her other aunts and uncles all adored before she left for the US, or about the time her older sister asked to borrow her handcrafted purse made out of scrap fabrics she had saved over the years to impress her now husband of 30 years and lost it halfway through their first date, or about how she had felt so lost when she followed a wealthy Chinese family living in Vietnam to Canada as a nanny before she found her way to Boston. but the hair-cutting… that’s one of those times. 

Because as soon as her mom sprinkles baby powder on the back of Larissa’s neck to brush away the tiny strands of hair that have stubbornly stayed and hands Larissa the broom to sweep up her hair and pats her on her back and sends her on her way with an overly carefully enunciated “Take care” (in English), her mom is back to her usual self, doing what she thinks is best for Larissa and often without asking, and Larissa is back to hers—quiet on the outside as she takes it all in stride because otherwise she’s “disrespectful” and “doesn’t care about her family,” and always, always shaking, as she struggles to contain the screams in her throat.

It gets better later, when Larissa musters up the courage to ask if her mother wants to try doing different cuts, and they spend hours watching a 45-minute Youtube tutorial at least three times. Her mom ignores the English narration and the music/speed-cutting montage effects completely, eyes focused only on the (usually) white hands that slice away at a mannequin’s wig the way Larissa wishes she could paint—fast, strong, decisive strokes. And her mom starts asking her about school and her art during this time, too, giving her little more than a nod that Larissa can’t tell if it’s approving or polite. 

But then one day she notices her mom’s been asking her about her art more even when she’s not cutting Larissa’s hair and hasn’t been as controlling. And then there’s another day that her mom’s chattering away with her childhood best friend on the phone that she talks to only once a year, though they always talk for hours, as if they didn’t go a year without talking, for their annual Lunar New Year call. 

This time, her mom got something from her best friend in the mail, and it’s a pencil sketch—a self-portrait Larissas mom had done when she was 19, and Larissa’s struck by how similar they look, because she first thought she was looking at a drawing of _herself_ , and it looks so much like a self-portrait she did during her first year at Samwell. She looks at her mom’s hands, then looks at her own. Looks at how her mom’s hands and her own hands touch the weathered paper so gently, at how her mom’s eyes soften, but at Larissa or the drawing, Larissa doesn’t know, and then the moment breaks. 

Her mom shoos her away, because her dad is calling from upstairs, asking Larissa to come and help translate some medical forms from her grandmother’s recent hospital stay that Larissa always asks Ransom about for the plain English translation first, and as she always does, Larissa's mom says, “Take care,” in that over-careful way, and for some reason, this time, the two syllables sound like the three Larissa had never thought she would ever hear her mom say.


End file.
